Helen Schulman’s new novel, “This Beautiful Life” centers on a privileged New York family that comes apart when their teenage son, Jake, gets tangled up in an Internet sex scandal.

The novel follows a narrative trajectory that has become disturbingly familiar with the rise of sexting cases: girl likes boy, girl emails boy a sexually explicit video of herself, boy forwards email to a couple of friends, boy’s friends forward it to classmates, boy gets suspended, boy’s family hires a high-powered lawyer, young lives are ruined.

Grappling with the legal and moral issues surrounding the subject was challenging enough, but Schulman found herself struggling with an even more basic narrative mechanism — time. She wanted the novel to take place in the present, but felt she couldn’t keep her story current enough. Every time she came close to finishing the book, another scandal involving sexting or Internet privacy emerged, creating a whole new web of quandaries to explore.

“The world was changing so rapidly that what was shocking one day was not shocking the next,” says Schulman, who teaches writing at the New School. “How people feel about privacy was changing all the time, and it became very hard to figure out how to end the book.”

She decided to freeze the book in the recent past. She got research assistants to dig up pop culture references from 2003, including a hit song (the thematically appropriate “Naughty Girl,” by Beyonce), images of clothing featured in a 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, and an “it couple” (remember Bennifer?).

Schulman, mother to a teen and a pre-teen, talked with Speakeasy about the way we email now.

What drew you to this subject?

In the school system, there were rumors of kids who had sent sexts… I thought it would make a good nonfiction book, and I tried to research it and was stymied, so I thought I would make it up.

Stymied? What do you mean by that?

I contacted the school and nobody wanted to talk to me. I thought, “Well, that’s probably good.”

Why was that good?

Story truth feels realer than nonfiction.

A review in the New York Observer described “This Beautiful Life” as a novel about how the Internet is stripping us of our humanity. Did you intend to make that point?

I honestly don’t agree with that. I think what Daisy does is very human; it’s extremely naked. The desire to share something that upsets one or scares or titillates is human. The Internet does many things that are extremely valuable and truly exciting. One thing I do think it does is endanger privacy, and I value privacy. In some ways, it’s a defense of privacy

Were you worried the novel might be seen as overly moralistic, and if so, what did you do to try to avoid that trap?

I don’t feel like it’s my place to judge. The characters all made big mistakes. They’re human. …An editor early on said to me about the book, “I think fiction should teach me how to live,” and I thought, that’s not my job. I show how people do live.

Did writing this make you think differently about how we communicate electronically?

I spent so much time with this, and every once in a while I send an email and I think, “Should I have put that in an email?”